Keyflower

Overview

You’ve finally come upon a new world aboard the stout Keyflower and all you’ve got is a village square along with a wagon to transport materials. There’s so much opportunity and so many possibilities to build up your village in your own image. You’ve even managed to recruit some loyal men to your cause. Loyal, hardworking men who will help you grow and develop your village. The catch? They’re fairly clannish and don’t get along with each other! Good luck getting these guys to work together…

Keyflower is a game for 2-6 players where you’ll start out with a small backwater town square but you’ll be adding to it by putting your workers out to help you build new structures, gather more resources, and transport those resources around to help you upgrade your structures. What makes this challenging is that you have to allocate your workers wisely since workers of one color simply don’t get along with workers of a different color and you’ll need to make sure you have enough workers to win the auction for new buildings.

So wait… is this a worker placement game with an auction mechanic? You got it.

But wait, there’s more! When you win a tile, you also have to configure it so that it’s attached by road to your other structures, giving this game a mix of Power Grid, Agricola, and Carcassonne! And don’t think that just because you own those tiles means you have exclusive access to those tiles; other players can use them too. In doing so, they can make your day miserable by using workers you’re short on, which means that, for all the workers you have, you can’t even work your own buildings. How frustrating is that?

Core Mechanics: Bidding, Worker Placement, Route Building.

Victory Condition: Keyflower’s win condition is basically to get the most points. How you get those points is up to you, but the game rewards you with points for upgrading certain tiles in your village. On top of that, there’s also a collection mechanism at work as well. Depending on the tile you have, you may get points for collecting a large number of a particular resource or having those resources on the correct tile. Some tiles will even give you points for collecting sets of workers or special equipment tiles too!

Ease of learning: Keyflower isn’t a game I’d teach to board game newbies since it consists of mechanics that are a bit overwhelming for first-time players. That’s because you’d have to teach them the bidding process, you’d have to teach them the worker placement concept (and the fact that you can place workers on other players’ hexes), and you’d have to teach them the resource transportation mechanic. On top of that, explaining what the symbols mean can be aggravating. What makes it worse, however, is that people don’t grasp the resource transport and upgrade mechanic on the first go, so you’ll probably have to explain that repeatedly.